I want to appologize to anyone who visited this blog over the last few days and was re-directed to Chinese spam advertising sites. My WordPress PHP theme files were hacked. I’d have noticed sooner except I’m on the road. It’s related to the IframeRef.gen exploit.

Again, sorry. It should be all fixed now, and should not have harmed your machine or affected it in any way after you closed the spammy tab.

I was looking my notes on MPI, the message-passing interface used for multi-processing, and I’ve moved some of them to this blog (under papers). I’ve organized the notes into about 20 separate pages so far, with more planned. Here is the root-level MPI page.

But I don’t think WordPress is the right tool to publish stuff like this. First of all, although WordPress provides an in-browser editor for these pages, but you only want to use it for touch up and minor edits. It’s easy to discard work, and it’s slow.

WordPress also provides only rudimentary page organization tools. The 20-odd pages there now are already getting cumbersome, and the whole thing will be impossible when it gets to 50 pages. I like a lot of short linked pages so this is a major problem.

I had to mark the 20 pages as “published” to make them public, and there is no way to publish all the pages as a group. Instead I had to go to each page individually. Each page takes about 30 seconds.

Finally there’s not very good support for things like up/previous/next links, TOC, or index. All these can be defined, but I was hoping for something built in.

So I’m going to experiment with a more complete CMS, maybe Drupal or Joomla. A wiki might be a good experiment too.

I added “live comment preview” as a wordpress plugin. It’s not the kind of preview that I’m used to — it shows the preview underneath the comment box as you type it. So it changes every time you type a new letter into your comment. I guess that’s what “live” means.